Timely visits by two of Professional
Imagemaker's contributors to either end of the
Americas seemed too good an opportunity for a
dual article so we debriefed both Paul Gallagher
and John Rowell on their return.

Yosemite and Patagonia are two places which
appear on the bucket lists of many photographers
but only a few actually make it to either. They are
not even in the same hemisphere and so do
not share seasons in any way. They share similar
rock geology consisting of granite topped with
sedimentary rock that has been ground away
by glaciation. The weather in Patagonia is more
extreme, indeed the area hosts the secondlargest
ice field on Earth and many permanent
glaciers. The smoothness of the Yosemite rock
walls is contrasted with the towering, frostshattered
peaks of Patagonia. For the curious,
the scale in landscape images is always a puzzle
demanding an answer. The mountain complex of
the Torres del Paine from Punta Bariloche round
to the Torres Norte is about 8 miles which makes
it comparable in span to the Coullin of Skye. The
famous W-walk around and about the Torres del
Paine spans Punta Bariloche to the Torres but
the route winds in and out of the valleys for a
three-day tour.

Patagonia was first introduced to a wider English
audience with the publication of Across Patagonia
in 1880 by British aristocrat, Lady Florence Dixie.
She was the first tourist to come to Torres del
Paine and arrived with her group in 1879; her
vivid description of her first sight of Torres del
Paine: "...now, as if by magic, from the bowels
of the earth, a grand and glorious landscape
had sprung up around us ...jagged peaks were
cleft in the most fantastic fashion...". She was led
by Avelino Arias and other Baqueanos (Chilean
cowboys).

FitzRoy at Dawn

More recently the area has been described with
the words: "climbing in Patagonia will leave you
with bragging rights that will last a lifetime." The
first ascent of the Central Torres del Paine was
in 1962 by Chris Bonington and Don Whillans.
Whillans had a near miss when a fixed rope on
the Central Torres del Paine snapped and he
managed to put his weight on the holds with
split-second timing before retying the rope. It
was only as recently as 2013 that someone
traversed all three Paine Towers solo.

Yosemite is probably better known to UK readers
but shares the same predominantly granite
rocks as Torres del Paine but is characterised
by towering, vertical walls rather than jagged
towers. Both have long been the playground
of serious mountaineers; both are providers of
spectacular landscape scenery. In many ways
the scenery of Yosemite has been defined via the
photography of Ansel Adams.